I created priv and pub key using puttygen. Configured on user acct and tried using with filezilla/putty/winscp with no luck. It fails pub key authentication. I triend renaming pub key to .key and still no luck. Any ideas?

yes, i know. I've already read that post. It works fine for FTP and FTPS, so the user itself is fine. I generated new pairs 3 times with 1024 and 2048, no luck. Server log says 'SSH authentication failed'. What else can I try?

also, sftp works fine WITHOUT using pub/priv keys. So here's a couple additional questions:1) Is there a specific directory the pub keys need to reside? (currently, while specify pub key in user acct, i am unable to browse to OS C: drive or any other directory besides the FTP HOME user directory. I don't recall this being the case on the trial version)2) Do I need to give special permissions to SYSTEM account (or other) where the SSH pub keys are stored?3) Does the pub key need to be a .key file format?